The Issue with Emily Wilson and The Odyssey booktube literature books [MjzeXEvbbzt]
A guy saw Emily Wilson call Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey abysmal and replied, “does she think she wrote the Odyssey because she translated it.” Here is the uncomfortable answer. In the only way that reaches you, she did. You have never read Homer. You read a translator. And a translator is not a machine swapping Greek for English. No clean swap exists. She decides every word, every rhythm, every shade of tone in the version you hold. The book in your hands belongs to her as much as to Homer. Take the first word Homer uses for Odysseus. Polytropos: Many-turned, a man of many ways. Fagles rewrote it as “the man of twists and turns.” Wilson rewrote it as one word, “complicated” Read hers and Odysseus stops being a shining hero. He becomes a man you are not sure you trust. Same Greek, two different characters. She did not copy Homer. She authored an Odysseus of her own. So Wilson did not carry the Odyssey across a language. She wrote one. Nolan did not adapt Homer. He adapted her and named her his inspiration. We need to give translators their credit where it’s due, and Emily Wilson is wholly deserving of being given more credit than simply moving blocks of text from Ancient Greek into English as if she swapped forks for knives in the silverware drawer.